March 19, 2009

“I see no reason to bog things down here like that”

Once again, Macon D censored my comment on his blog. Luckily, I saved my comment to a text file:

Macon D,

Of course, sometimes you appear to learn, and sometimes you incorporate what you’ve learned in other blogs and improved the recent quality of your posts. Maybe it’s even far more common than I realize, and the white assumption that you are the race expert isn’t pervasive throughout your blog at all.

But then, it may be worth noting here how, you one gave advice to another white person on how to travel toward what you called the “palace of racial wisdom”; you gave a suggestion about how to safely appropriate from indigenous people; you believe that it is your duty as a white person to generalize the racial experiences of people of colour; you once believed that it was your duty to be a spokesperson for black people; and later on you wrote, “Many posts on my blog effectively summarize black observation and opinion and black reportage of personal experience”. I also just realized that you “apologized” to Okanagan with “my apologies if the post offended you”, which is a variation of “I’m sorry if you were offended.” And your “apology” also included “I’m sorry to hear that you sense a “prideful” presence in me” (emphasis mine).

I hope that you, a white antiracist, are not reproducing the white views and white power relations that your antiracist blog is supposed to be criticizing. But at this point, in my continual effort to come to terms with your writings on race, I think you might be.

Perhaps it was too subtle, but this is a satire of his post laugh at deadpan comedians starting from “Of course, some”, and it is a response to his insistence that the “Of course, some” disclaimer paragraph in his “laugh at deadpan” post nullifies what comes after.

In the end, he published the last paragraph, decontextualizing it as a satire, so that it looks like I was bringing up something that was off topic to the conversation.

It seems like Macon believes he has mastered the art of double-speak and, in his mind, no one is supposed to notice the words that come out the other side of his mouth. Plus I can’t get over the sure racism in Macon’s differential view of himself vs. the comedian, Stew. He obviously didn’t “speculate”, wonder or consider that Stew could have had a “predilection for deadpan” as a result of the “White (racial) inheritance” he possibly has.

My bad. Macon, in his “continual effort to come to terms with common white tendencies”, his and that of other [Whites], “it might be” a “nearly, purely white” thing, leaving Stew out. But, “what do you think? …do you see anything else in [Stew’s] performance style that’s particularly white?”

According to the world-famous blog Stuff White People Like, “all white people love Sushi.” Actually, I know a lot of white people who refuse to even try sushi, so that claim seems fallacious (and maybe even specious).

I said that those are the “wrong kind of white people”, and that when a white in-law visited our family in Toronto, my mother suggested going out for sushi because she also thinks white people love sushi. However, that in-law was not that kind of what person. I also said that Christian Lander was from Toronto.

However, that comment was never published.

On the other hand, the name I submitted with my comment was “Restructure was censored yesterday” and the website linked to this post.

Hence, I was censored two times in two days.

On Twitter, someone jokingly commented that I was addicted to SWPD. But these types of things keep happening that piss me off. Should I just ignore SWPD?

I mean, it looks like he’s censoring out criticism. It’s not like my last comment was off topic in any myopic sense.

I think what she says against “teaching Whites how to be better racists” was, intuitively, the reason why I was against asking Macon to change his posts with his not-so-sly requests for suggestions for how he should word things. And, of course, we all can remember how Macon pretended to agree with us (Restructure, in particular) when we said POC shouldn’t have to “teach” him (what to say, how to say it, what’s offensive, etc.) even as he insisted on just that via his famous requests for “revision suggestions.”

And nothing says Hypocrisy As A Way Of Life like “white culture does not have a function that says: your words and your actions must match. this is why so often you hear folks say: that wasnt what i meant.”

I never wanted Macon D to change his posts in a way that hides his errors/the modification history. I often strongly suggested to him to make use of the strikeout function.

If Macon D changes his posts without acknowledging what he changed, of course when people read the criticisms of PoC, it will look like we’re lying. However, he has changed his posts without acknowledging what he changed, which has the effect of making him look like a good antiracist, not acknowledging our (months-old) criticisms were correct, and not acknowledging that his ideas were not all his own.

I’m done with this. I’m going to take Mai’a’s advice. I can’t change Macon D’s tendency to view PoC writings as a resource to exploit and build his own credentials. I can’t help it that he goes around to antiracist PoC like resistance at Resist Racism and suggests that they read the works of white antiracist authors. I can’t help that he reads my personal views on my defunct Double Consciousness Debates blog and then later on used my writing to state authoritatively what all Asian American women think. I can’t help that he suggested that he could theoretically take legal action against me because he interpreted my scare quotes in SWPS post titles as direct quotes:

Are you getting my point yet, that your use of quoted-material-that’s-not-actually-a-quote is inaccurate, misleading, and downright pernicious (and who knows–maybe even legally actionable? what if I decide to publish some of the material that I’ve written on my blog?).

The authors he quoted are mostly I assume “must reads” for white anti-racists I think. Knowing Tim Wise as a white anti-racist is ‘mandatory’ in the US I guess. I can’t help but think that he just wants to boast what books he allegedly knows. Every field has its ‘experts’ one has to know to be an ‘expert’ on his own.